The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka - You've Been Detoxing Wrong This Whole Time ft. Dr. Rahm, Dr. Kim & Dr. Peatross | TUH #289

Episode Date: July 23, 2026

Most people grab a binder or start a cleanse and go straight to war on mold, Lyme, and heavy metals. Doing it in that order can make you far sicker than the toxins ever did. In this one, we break down... why your drainage has to open first, the quiet signs it's blocked, and why the real problem almost never shows up on a 'normal' bloodwork panel. If you've been chasing symptoms no test can explain, this conversation will change how you think about detox for good. CLICK HERE TO BECOME GARY’S VIP!: ⁠https://bit.ly/4ai0Xwg⁠ Connect with Dr. Jessica Peatross: Website: ⁠https://bit.ly/42bHjQk⁠ Website: ⁠https://bit.ly/43TUrei⁠  YouTube: ⁠https://bit.ly/4j29ebk⁠  Instagram: ⁠https://bit.ly/42bQ9gV⁠  Facebook: ⁠https://bit.ly/4icN2tJ⁠  Connect with Dr. John Kim Website: ⁠https://bit.ly/4x4xGAg⁠    YouTube: ⁠https://bit.ly/4aqYgd0⁠   Instagram: ⁠https://bit.ly/4acnBr7⁠   Facebook: ⁠https://bit.ly/49G7KRt⁠   X: ⁠https://bit.ly/3PFmMjN⁠  Connect with Dr. Christina Rahm: Website: ⁠http://bit.ly/44WKxaB⁠  YouTube: ⁠http://bit.ly/4eW7eQA⁠  Instagram: ⁠http://bit.ly/46lLLOR⁠  Facebook: ⁠http://bit.ly/4kO1B8k⁠  X.com: ⁠http://bit.ly/4kLROQf⁠  LinkedIn: ⁠http://bit.ly/4kRxm0C⁠  Thank you to our partners A-GAME: “ULTIMATE15” FOR 15% OFF: http://bit.ly/4kek1ij AION: “ULTIMATE10” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4h6KHAD AIRES: "ULTIMATE20 " FOR 20% OFF: https://bit.ly/4a3Duze BAJA GOLD: "ULTIMATE10" FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/3WSBqUa BODYHEALTH: “ULTIMATE20” FOR 20% OFF: http://bit.ly/4e5IjsV COLD LIFE: THE ULTIMATE HUMAN PLUNGE: https://bit.ly/4eULUKp CYMBIOTIKA: "ULTIMATE20" FOR 20% OFF: https://bit.ly/4tjyluP  GENETIC METHYLATION TEST (UK ONLY): https://bit.ly/48QJJrk GENETIC TEST (USA ONLY): ⁠https://bit.ly/3Yg1Uk9 GOPUFF: GET YOUR FAVORITE SNACK!: https://bit.ly/4obIFDC H2TAB: “ULTIMATE10” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4hMNdgg HEALF: 10% OFF YOUR ORDER: https://bit.ly/41HJg6S PEPTUAL: “TUH10” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4mKxgcn SNOOZE: LET’S GET TO SLEEP!: https://bit.ly/4pt1T6V WHOOP: JOIN & GET 1 FREE MONTH!: https://bit.ly/3VQ0nzW Watch  the “Ultimate Human Podcast” every Tuesday & Thursday at 9AM EST: YouTube: ⁠https://bit.ly/3RPQYX8⁠ Podcasts: ⁠https://bit.ly/3RQftU0⁠ Connect with Gary Brecka Instagram: ⁠https://bit.ly/3RPpnFs⁠ TikTok: ⁠https://bit.ly/4coJ8fo⁠X: ⁠https://bit.ly/3Opc8tf⁠ Facebook: ⁠https://bit.ly/464VA1H⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://bit.ly/4hH7Ri2⁠ Website: ⁠https://bit.ly/4eLDbdU⁠ Merch: ⁠https://bit.ly/4aBpOM1⁠ Newsletter: ⁠https://bit.ly/47ejrws⁠ Ask Gary: ⁠https://bit.ly/3PEAJuG⁠ Timestamps 00:00 – Intro of Show 00:12 – The doctor who left conventional medicine 01:08 – Fired for flagging an 8-year prescription 01:08 – The Lyme case that changed everything 03:34 – First rule: remove yourself from the environment 04:41 – Calming the nervous system before anything else 04:41 – Can't sweat or poop? Your drainage is blocked 05:45 – Why jumping to detox backfires 06:51 – A heart attack traced back to a moldy house 07:58 – The ENCORE method explained 09:05 – Why is the environment the step you can't hack 09:05 – Non-native EMF and cellular stress 10:24 – Fainting, fever, and a misdiagnosed young patient 12:12 – Immune fatigue and the aging immune system 12:48 – Binders, zeolites, and supporting the cell while you detox Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational purposes only and does not provide medical advice. It is not intended for diagnosing or treating any health condition. Always consult a licensed healthcare professional before making health or wellness decisions.  Gary Brecka is the owner of Ultimate Human, LLC which operates The Ultimate Human podcast and promotes certain third-party products used by Gary Brecka in his personal health and wellness protocols and daily life and for which Ultimate Human LLC and / or Gary Brecka directly or indirectly holds an economic interest or receives compensation.  Accordingly, statements made by Gary Brecka and others (including on The Ultimate Human podcast) may be considered promotional in nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:12 Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brecker, and today we're talking about one of the most misunderstood mistakes in the entire detox world. But before that, I want to ask you something. If you started a detox and felt worse, not better, what did you assume that it was working, that you finally were pushing the toxins out? What if it wasn't progress? What if it was your body just telling you it's not ready? Every doctor I trust says the same thing. Detox order matters more than detox intensity. Skip a step and you don't heal faster. You just get sicker on a new timeline.
Starting point is 00:00:47 So today, three doctors who learn this the hard way, not in a textbook, in their own bodies. We're starting with Dr. Jessica Petros. She walked out of conventional medicine to chase root causes. She'll tell you that the one rule she broke early in her career and never again is you cannot detox someone who's still living in an environment that's poisoning them. Let's get into it. And I would say my story exemplifies the saying from Rumi, the cracks are where the light enters. And so I started out training as a conventional medical doctor. I went to school at the University of Louisville and Kentucky.
Starting point is 00:01:21 I went to residency there. I did internal medicine and I was board certified. And I only worked in the hospital. And I learned a lot. I triaged and I kept care of a lot of sick patients. But eventually there started to be cracks in the system for me. I started asking questions that people didn't like. I started saying, you know, why am I different?
Starting point is 00:01:38 discharging people on 40 different medications. That's not health to me. The doctors should be really ashamed of the food that the hospital system has had contracts with. It doesn't make sense. I think they'd be ashamed if they knew. They don't know. Some of them don't know. And I will echo what you said. If I was in an emergency situation, I broke a leg. I held straight to the emergency department. No doubt. Thank God for acute medicine. But in chronic medicine, they kind of missed the mark. They did. And so, you know, I started to see that in the hospital system. And I started to ask questions. Maybe they didn't know. What would happen if I said something? And it wasn't, they labeled me a disruptive physician. It didn't turn out so well. And the last straw, actually, I had been complaining
Starting point is 00:02:17 about things. And last draw was I wrote this patient that's being emitted air service. I wrote this in the electronic medical record has been on a proton pump inhibitor called Prevacid for eight years. When the package insert, it clearly says six months to one year. And I wrote that in the chart. And the primary care doctor, who was an outpatient doctor, called the hospitalist lead hospitals to complain about me and said she's a liability rather than him being the liability for the medication he had this patient on for years. And they set me down and they said, listen, if you don't stop doing this, you can't work for us. And I'm kind of knee-jerk reactive sometimes, especially when I don't feel the ethics align with me. And I said, okay, I quit. And one particular patient sticks out
Starting point is 00:02:57 in my mind here at Whitaker Wellness. Actually, I was there when Dr. Mark Philaday was there, who does a lot in mold and lime. And it was the beginning of my career in functional medicine. I didn't know a lot about those topics. And a patient came in who had heart palpitations at night. And his thyroid was all messed up. And he had severe anxiety and all these other kind of just very vague catch-all symptoms. And I was new. So I asked Dr. Mark Philaday to see him for me as a second opinion.
Starting point is 00:03:24 And he came back and said, this guy's Lyme. And I missed it. And I didn't even think to test for it. And by God, I never missed it again. I'll tell you that. That was my lesson. So you do this test, and let's say that you find a mold species. You know, I've been told that the cardinal rule that you can't violate and sort of nothing else matters in the detox protocol is that a person has got to remove themselves from the toxic environment first.
Starting point is 00:03:51 Avoidance. First rule of environmental medicine, a thousand percent. And I will tell you, based on genetic predispositions, how full their toxin bucket is, how stressed out they are. There are a number of multifactorial reasons people may not do well in mold. But I can sometimes open people's drainage in mold if they're more of a warrior genotype. If they have HLADR, which is a haplaginic haplotype, but that it's on the, like a little sticker that's on the immune cells, these people don't recognize pathogen proteins as well. So they don't recognize Lyme. They don't recognize mold spores as well. So they can't remove them from the body. And they cause sickness in these people, I mean, really deathly ill sickness. Wow.
Starting point is 00:04:26 And so I definitely can't get open the drainage if they're still in the exposure. So first stage is identify it, and the second stage is get them out of that environment or remediate the environment they're in because nothing that you will be able to do is going to help them if they're just continually inoculating themselves, right? But in general, first and foremost, like I mentioned, the nervous system regulation and taking care of histamine, which is so many people, I can't have their body just like so confused with chemical communicators that it's not going to take a protocol. So I have to calm the inflammation down. I have to give them antioxidants and basic building foundational nutrients so that they can fight. Great. Calm down everything. Then when they're sleeping a little bit better, they feel a little bit better.
Starting point is 00:05:10 They feel less anxious, less itchy and puffy. That's ready to open drainage, and that can take a month or two. If you're closed up and you tell me you can't poop every day or you can't sweat in a sauna within 10 to 15 minutes, and people tell me they can't sweat, that's not normal. Your bile and liver should be moving properly. You should be sleeping in decent. amount. And if that, I have to tune that up because if I can open those drainage pathways, then when I start killing and binding, they can drop it out of their body, out of their
Starting point is 00:05:39 bowels, out of their liver, out of their sweat. And if that's not open and I start a killing protocol, we're not going to be friends. They're not going to like me. That's exactly what we've experienced. I'm so glad you're talking about this because most people think I just take something and I start detoxing. And the, and the problem is that detoxification process can make you much sicker than the process of because at least your body has hidden it and it's in the tissues and it's contained it and you know it's having a low-grade inflammatory response your immune system is probably in a low-grade fight but it's manageable and then all of a sudden it flares up dr petros just gave you the rule get out of the toxic environment first nothing else works until you do that but removing the mold
Starting point is 00:06:19 is only step one what happens inside your cells once the exposure is already there that's where it gets interesting. Dr. John Kim found out the hard way, not through a patient, through his own heart attack at 33 years old. Doctors handed him a statin. He wanted an answer. What he found was Bartonella, mold, mercury, and a nervous system that had been running from all of it for years. He built a method most doctors skip. He calls it the Encore method, and it starts with a step almost nobody takes seriously. I end up having to be in the cardiac ICU unit, staring at a wall for three days. wondering how did this happen? And then I had this overweight physician coming in
Starting point is 00:07:00 and telling me to cut out old meat, cholesterol, and everything else. They put me on an October statin 80 milligrams. And I was like, this is nonsense. There's something wrong here. She did a blood work. And then after a month and a half later, that's when we've tested positive for espegillus antibodies, IGM, IGG, Bartonella infection,
Starting point is 00:07:19 Michael Plaza pneumonia, Epstein Barr, mercury poisoning on top of parasitic issues. I lived in a very moldy house to begin with growing up. Right. And then also lived in a very stressful environment growing up as well. That's when I already had an existing problem to begin with. I had anxiety left and right. I could not sleep that well when I was in my 20s and 30s.
Starting point is 00:07:40 And then when I actually had that heart attack, that's when I stopped to listen and figuring out what's going on. And I got the answer. And it took me about two years to clear it out. But it was a very tough process. And that was the moment that I found out how something. Cellular integrity is so vitally important for your health. You call it, which I thought was absolutely genius, the Encore method. The environment, the nervous system, cellular integrity, which virtually nobody talks about.
Starting point is 00:08:10 You know, Dr. Pampa, and there's a few other leaders in this area. Optimized detox and rebalancing the microbiome. I think what happens is most people skip the ENCO and go right to the R and start balancing the microbiome. Correct. So the reason that I came up with this particular Encore method was after learning and diving into the whole cell danger response method, when you look at Dr. Robert Nabio's work of cell danger response, it's very complex. And it's very difficult for you to take that information and put into clinical use of it. And so I was just thinking, like, what can I do to utilize this correctly for people who are dealing with biotoxin issues? Like if it was me back in 2015, if I had a particular methodology, what would I do it differently?
Starting point is 00:08:55 The first thing was basically the environment factor there, right? Environment, if you are stuck in the same environment that made you sick, you're not going to get better. No chance. I always say that. Right. You cannot out biohack on that part, right? Environment is the best thing that you could actually into fixing. And this part is often difficult.
Starting point is 00:09:11 The second thing I would also recommend if you could hire the same people that does it. Great. But building biologists. Why? Non-Native EMF. Why is that? And I'm a strong believe in this part now, more and more. The reason being is why is it that people are getting sicker and sicker even though we have advanced in medicine and such?
Starting point is 00:09:32 I mean, you could talk about food, the glyphocytes, and all these things. But when you look at the bombarding issue, dealing with the cellular stress that we're dealing right now with non-native EMF, it's over than anything we could actually fathom now. Compared to what it was 100 years ago, is much, much greater. Okay, Dr. Kim just laid out the sequence. Environment first, nervous system next.
Starting point is 00:09:54 Cellular repair before you ever even touch the gut. That's the framework. Here's what it looks like when nobody hands you a framework at all. Dr. Christina Ram was 19 years old. She fainted in a movie theater. She woke up and couldn't remember her own name. No functional medicine doctor, no detox plan, just a diagnosis nobody believed
Starting point is 00:10:13 in a body that was falling apart in real time. What she did next with nothing but curiosity and her mother's background in herbs became the foundation for everything she teaches today. I was at a movie theater with my boyfriend at the time and one of my sorority sisters. I mean, and they're in a bunch of friends. And I fainted. And they got me to wake up, but I couldn't, I had such a high temperature and I couldn't remember my name. And I still remember my father. I love my father.
Starting point is 00:10:44 So if he's watching this, I just, I love it. He didn't believe it was a real diagnosis because remember at the time, no one really understood it. And then you're right, they were throwing everything at me. But even at that age, so I was younger, growing up in a small town where my mother, the Native American background and then the Eastern European background, like the, I think on both sides of my families with herbs and vitamins and everything they wanted to, they didn't really believe in taking us to a doctor. They believed in us naturally treating things. So they threw everything at me. I looked like a completely different person. I was swollen all over.
Starting point is 00:11:22 I was miserable. So corticosteroids will do that terribly. And I just, yeah, they had me on everything. It's a mixture in my opinion of taking different steps nutritionally, even sometimes pharmaceutically, but spiritually, emotionally and mentally believing in yourself. And from my perspective, I really started studying things that could detox my mind. body, not really having any support from a medical community. But I feel like there's a parasitic component to that because your spiralsheets and you're
Starting point is 00:11:51 right, they're hiding everywhere, trying to come out. So you know with cancer cells, once you have a cancer diagnosis, you can go into remission. But unless you're constantly, and this is just my opinion, detoxing and keeping that the communication down between cancer cells or the communication down between spiro sheets or Lyme's disease, it rears its ugly head. I totally agree with you. You know, there's an emerging theory in aging called immunophatee.
Starting point is 00:12:18 And it's the assumption that, you know, progressively as we age, the immune system gets more and more and more overwhelmed. And things like Lyme disease, especially, as well as mold, mycotoxins, viruses, parasites, just distract the immune system. The immune systems over here, you know, trying to deal with the Lyme. So how is it supposed to protect you? your P450 system, your IL2, IL4 pathways are like rammed up by trash, right? Yeah. So how is it supposed to work? We've got to understand your body can only handle so many things.
Starting point is 00:12:54 So what are we going to do to change that? And when you buy a new refrigerator or a new air condition for a place like your beautiful home, you don't have to worry about it at first. Mm-hmm. Maybe. But after 10 years or 20 and our earth is, our land, air and water has gotten older. and our bodies have had to deal with all these outside, like Lyme's disease. So that's personally what I've asked doctors and what I've treated myself with,
Starting point is 00:13:21 along with turmeric curciman. I think you probably know this about me. I believe in zeolites and silicas to detox. I'm a huge believer. By the way, those are gut binders, yeah. Yeah, because you're trying to get it all out, right? But then another thing for me is every time I look at detox, I'm trying to focus on how do we detox people while,
Starting point is 00:13:40 we're also providing what they need for their body, which if you look at like black cumin seed, turmeric curcumin, if you look at different types of zealites, which you add like a trace mineral component and vitamins, then you can make sure when you're cleaning the system, you're also supporting the cell so they're restoring back to what they should be. Yeah, eliminating the waste. I mean, I see it all the time.
Starting point is 00:14:02 I mean, if you don't get rid of the exhaust, it will back up and blow the engine. Three doctors, three bodies that broke down before anyone would listen. From Dr. Petros, you cannot detox your way out of an environment that's still poisoning you. Remove the exposure first. Calm the nervous system second. Open the drainage third. Skip that order and detox makes you sicker, not better.
Starting point is 00:14:24 From Dr. Kim, a heart attack at 33 wasn't a cholesterol problem. It was mold, bardonella, and mercury in his body that he'd been fighting silently for years. Environment, nervous system, cellular integrity, optimized detox. balance the gut in that order. Skip straight to the gut and you're rebuilding on a foundation that's still toxic. From Dr. Ram, at 19, she lost her memory and nearly lost herself. Nobody handed her a protocol. She built one out of necessity and it saved her life. Three different bodies, same lesson. The order you detox in matters more than what you detox with. And that's just science.

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